Google has reportedly removed much of Twitter’s links from its search results after the social network’s owner Elon Musk announced reading tweets would be limited.
Search Engine Roundtable found that Google had removed 52% of Twitter links since the crackdown began last week. Twitter now blocks users who are not logged in and sets limits on reading tweets.
According to Barry Schwartz, Google reported 471 million Twitter URLs as of Friday. But by Monday morning, that number had plummeted to 227 million.
“For normal indexing of these Twitter URLs, it seems like these tweets are dropping out of the sky,” Schwartz wrote.
Platformer reported last month that Twitter refused to pay its bill for Google Cloud services.
Elon going to complain about another conspiracy going on while in reality it’s just that when crawlers are not able to open a certain URL they simply assume that the page doesn’t exist anymore. Google certainly didn’t “retaliate”, bots simply couldn’t find those pages anymore.
The headline is actually wrong. Google did not do anything to Twitter. Twitter fucked up their own SEO by removing access to its content.
Yeah, that’s a pretty easy and reasonable conclusion to come to if you think about if for more than five seconds. I’m not sure Elon has any toes left after he keeps shooting himself in the feet.
If your company cares about it’s SEO rankings, you don’t make changes like these without considering the SEO implications.
Not even a month later and said company rebranded itself without checking trademarks. Now we have “X”, a brand that non only risks infringement of quite a few registered eu-trademarks but didn’t even apply for an own eu-trademark…
Has anyone noticed too that if you put AI Blockers on your website Google delists it from their search?
Elon, please buy Reddit and repeat your amazing ideas over there. You are so smart.
Very good. An evil corporation doing evil things to an evil agenda.
The details are unclear as to why these links were removed. Opining on Alphabet’s morals at this point is premature.
It’s not premature because calling Google evil has absolutely nothing to do with this action.
We don’t need to make up reasons to call corpos such as Alphabet evil. The fact of the matter is that at this time, nobody even knows if Google lifted a finger to forward the delisting of Tweets. For all we know, it could be entirely on Twitter’s end.
Hence, assigning blame to Google for this without understanding their role in it is premature.
It could also be the search algorithm reacting to all the users returning to google after seeing only the login page
This morning, I needed to use image search for a bit and basically 4/5 links leading to Twitter wouldn’t load for various reasons. That was not on Google, but I imagine, they have (had) similar problems.
Well, and for normal search, Twitter results are completely worthless to me, as I don’t have an account. So, at this rate, no results from Twitter would be the optimum.
is there a human behind such decisions or is it just an automated algorithm?
Well, at the very least, there’s humans constantly tweaking that algorithm, whether it’s for fine-tuning search results or just making SEO less useful.
Twitter was an important unifying communications tool during the Arab Spring. The Arab spring was a threat to biz as usual in places like Saudi Arabia. The second largest investor in Twitter is Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia killed and dismembered a journalist from the US, more or less in plain sight. Elon is now killing and dismembering Twitter in plain sight to limit its power as a unifying tool that stands as a demonstrable, active threat to capitalism and oligarchs around the world.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires. It’s part of why spez is trying to tank Reddit. Remember how dangerous Reddit was to capitalism’s status quo around the time of GME/Robinhood/Antiwork recently.
The specific moment we’re in right now is meant to shatter consolidated organizing power on Reddit as we splinter into several smaller alternative platforms (or for some, disconnect entirely). Not saying we shouldn’t be in Lemmy, but calling out the larger reality of the moment.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires.
This sounds a lot like Hanlon’s razor. “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Do you really believe that people like spez, Zuckerberg, Musk behave like they do because they want to do favors for other billionaires? Isn’t it much more likely that they’re just … disturbed? That they are narcissistic, megalomaniac, maybe idealistic in their own believe. And in being that, they make stupid decisions because they literally work differently than regular folks.
Obviously, this is political and dangerous, and Musk should send a letter to HQ telling them to, well, go to sleep and just not wake up. Google knows exactly what they’re doing. We already know Google has blacklisted Truth and Rumble, and other sites it doesn’t like, and they’re about to do it to Twitter. They didn’t do this to Reddit when it went private. Also, if you don’t believe me, use Bing and search for Truth and Rumble and everything is correctly indexed, then look at Google, and it doesn’t index hardly anything.
I’ve been saying for a while now that Google is one of the most dangerous companies in the world, and one of the most partisan if anything.
If you think I’m being dramatic, just look at some leaked footage to understand how this company operates. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6162889/Leaked-Google-conference-video-shows-founder-comparing-Trump-voters-extremists.html
I won’t even mention their news tab, advertising business, insanely biased search results or anything like that, but google in its entirety is an insanely dangerous company that takes action based on their political beliefs, and because of the scale of Twitter and Google, it’s definitely discrimination and shouldn’t be tolerated. I’m just happy that Google is getting less popular every day.
